Genre: Hurt / Comfort, Angst
Characters: Gibbs and the gang
Disclaimers: Don't own NCIS or the opening quote!
…..
"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars." Kahlil Gibran
….
I tell them lets go home when in all reality I want to scream out something else.
I refuse to draw any more attention to why we are here, why my team is bruised, battered, and no doubt near the point of starvation. I won't make eye contact with Ziva, the real reason for this suicide revenge mission.
When I finally touch down on American soil I release a breath that I was unaware I had been holding. Everyone's home, shattered in their own ways yes, but they will live to see another day, and will rise up and once again fight the valiant fight.
I crave seeing the typical orange walls and I crave that feeling of security that those walls and the badge that I carry afford me. I expect to step foot off the elevator and dig into cold case files because the safety of seeking justice will keep me from going home and drowning out everything with bourbon. I need more than amber liquid-more importantly my team needs more from me.
Yet what my eyes and ears are assaulted with upon getting off the elevator is not the professionalism and quiet nature that makes NCIS run so efficiently.
Instead I heard thunderous clapping led by the Director himself, and I see the eyes of everyone on our floor follow my team until we are back at our desks. It takes minutes for the clapping to subside but it feels like an eternity. Then everyone is coming up to me and Tim, Tony, and Ziva to offer empty platitudes, congratulations, and questions about the mission.
I want to yell at everyone to leave us alone, let us do our jobs, let us heal in peace! But no words come.
It is then that I realize that my people are bruised, battered, and beaten.
They all retain some physical and mental wounds from the Somalian mission. They have all been forever changed and I am unsure if they can go back to being the innocent, joking crowd that they used to be.
What makes it worse is that everyone knows about their scars.
There will be no private healing thanks to the agency's shrinks and debriefings that surely will follow. There will be people who will crawl over every aspect of what happened over there, with a fine tooth comb making sure that all the wounds heal before there can be any moving forward.
It also dawns on you that maybe the public wounds are better than the private ones that I carried because of my wife and daughter.
I think that maybe that means that there is hope that these family members of mine will heal and come back with even more resolve. Maybe they will be able to get back to who they were before, and maybe they won't have to go down a path of self destruction.
Maybe they can be saved like I never could.
Maybe I too can heal.
